$20M In ONE Day?! (#544)

01 Feb 2024 (11 months ago)

Intro (0s)

The entrepreneur launched a product with high demand.
He limited access to 5,000 people.
This generated $20 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) on the first day of the product launch.

Follow-up Boss, a real estate CRM platform, was founded by Dan 12 years ago.
The idea for Follow-up Boss came from Dan reading complaints about real estate software in Facebook groups.
Dan partnered with a developer friend to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and marketed the software by engaging in Facebook groups and offering help to potential customers.
Follow-up Boss bootstrapped its entire operation and reached $28 million in annual revenue with less than 100 employees before being acquired for $500 million ($400 million upfront and $100 million earnout).
Hampton recommends checking a company's public record of revenue, such as searching for "follow-up boss revenue" on Google, to find publicly available information.

OpenAI has created an App Store, similar to the iPhone App Store.
The pricing for developers has not been announced yet.
One company that the speaker invested in is considering creating a plugin for the OpenAI App Store.
This could be an inflection moment for the company, similar to how the App Store was for companies like Pandora and BetterHelp.
The speaker compares the potential of the OpenAI App Store to the success of companies like Honey and Grammarly, which utilized the Chrome Store.
Zinga, a company that utilized the Facebook platform, is mentioned as an example of a successful company that emerged from a platform's app store.

Consensus.app is an AI-powered app that summarizes and synthesizes scientific papers, making it a verticalized Google specifically for scientific research.
OpenAI is subsidizing the compute costs, increasing its accessibility for users.
Despite initial skepticism, the product has shown remarkable improvement and potential for success, surpassing Canva as the leading GPT.
The company is experimenting with payment terms for developers who create apps for the platform.
Consensus.app is part of a trend of companies capitalizing on the recent surge in AI popularity.
Investors who missed out on OpenAI are now investing in competitors like Stable Diffusion and Perplexity, leading to inflated valuations.
The speaker expresses skepticism about these inflated valuations, drawing parallels to similar situations in the crypto and mobile industries.
The speaker suggests that the company mentioned in the email conversation two years ago might be the same company being discussed.

Joe Speiser, a successful entrepreneur, sold his first company, an adtech company, for hundreds of millions of dollars at a young age.
He started a pet food company called Pet Flow, but faced competition from Chewy, which aggressively invested in customer acquisition.
To grow Pet Flow, Speiser created a blog about pets that quickly gained popularity, becoming the most shared website on Facebook, surpassing major publishers like Viral Nova, BuzzFeed, and HuffPost.
Within four years, Pet Flow reached $90 million in revenue and had 250 million unique monthly visitors to its website.
Speiser and his team built a $250,000 studio in anticipation of Facebook Live's growth, planning to capitalize on the platform's potential.
However, Facebook changed its strategy, leading to the collapse of Pet Flow. Within six to seven months, the company laid off its employees and shut down.
Speiser's story highlights the risks and uncertainties of entrepreneurship, despite the valuable lessons learned from failure.

Joe Rogan and his guest discuss the qualities of a harmonious partnership, emphasizing the importance of energy, integrity, and intelligence in a partner.
Energy is considered the easiest to spot and a must-have quality. Rogan mentions his positive experience working with someone who had high energy.
Look for people who are self-driven, take quick action, and are constantly thinking about their work. Their energy should come naturally and not require external motivation.
Assess their skills and expertise in specific areas. Identify individuals who excel in selling, building, or consistently pushing projects forward.
Integrity is the most challenging trait to evaluate. Consider talking to their previous colleagues or asking questions to gauge their honesty and behavior when faced with opportunities for selfishness.
Working with someone on a small project before committing to a larger partnership can provide valuable insights into their work ethic and compatibility.